SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- The two little girls, arms folded across
their chests to
ward off the unseasonable chill of the night, eyed the pair of
tall gringo men
speculatively, then offered tentative smiles. ``So, what's up?''
the older of the girls,
barely 13, asked.

``Nothing much,'' replied one of the men. ``What's up with you?''

``Well, I don't know,'' the girl answered, her smile bolder. ``You
look like you might
be looking for something. You look like you might want to buy
something.''

``Like us,'' the girl said. ``Like us.'' Both kids dissolved in
giggles, but when the
older one looked up again, her face was solemn. ``Thirty dollars
for my little
sister, 15 for me.''

Meet Stephanie, 12, and Ivette, 13, two members of a fast-growing
Costa Rican
workforce: child prostitutes. The country that prides itself
as Latin America's most
stable democracy and the inventor of ecotourism is becoming the
hemisphere's
best-known playground for pedophiles.

Every night, as many as 2,000 underage prostitutes walk the streets
of San Jose
or cater to more affluent clients behind the walls of stately
homes converted into
brothels in the city's best neighborhoods, according to an estimate
by an
organization that deals with the problem at an international
level. Other children
take off their clothes to pose for lewd pictures that will be
passed around the
Internet -- which, until last year, wasn't even a crime in Costa
Rica.

The problem has been developing for years. In 1996, the World
Congress Against
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm,
issued a report
noting that Costa Rica was becoming an important center for child
prostitution,
but the government's failure to act has generated increased international
scrutiny.

Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a
report saying it
was ``deeply concerned at the high incidence of commercial sexual
exploitation of
children in Costa Rica.''

Now, the Inter American Commission on Human Rights is scheduled
to hear a
formal complaint from Casa Alianza, a Costa Rican organization
designed to help
the child victims of sexual exploitation, charging that Costa
Rica has failed to
take action to stop ``the increase in the commercial sexual exploitation
of boys
and girls.''

Costa Rican diplomats have been frantically maneuvering to get
the March 3
hearing canceled, thus far with no success.

The boom in child sex is being fed from outside, by tough new
laws in the United
States that target pedophiles; a crackdown in Asia, the traditional
child-sex
capital of the world; and the Internet, which has made it easier
for pedophiles to
swap information.

It is the ugliest corner of a much larger sex-tourism industry
that, authorities
acknowledge, is bolstered not only by bit players like taxi drivers
and travel
agencies, but pillars of the Costa Rican economy, like large
hotels owned by U.S.
chains.

And it has exposed what some social workers say is an embarrassing
secret:
that children have long been sexual playthings here, and not
just for foreigners.
Eighteenth-century documents show that complaints of sexual abuse
of children
reached the Spanish Inquisition. And a 1999 U.N. report on child
prostitution
noted: ``The sexual exploitation of children has a long history
in Costa Rica.''

For much too long, social workers say, this society has looked
the other way as
children are victimized by the adults who are supposed to protect
them.

``I know, I know, the image of Costa Rica is that we're very well-educated,
very
refined, with close-knit families, little poverty, hardly any
illiteracy, no crime, the
Switzerland of Central America,'' says a bitter Magda Ramirez
de Castro, a
counselor who works with child prostitutes. ``All that is a myth.
Maybe it was true
10 years ago, but it's not now.''

As the world's purse strings tighten in the wake of the Cold War,
Costa Rica is
finding it hard to support the welfare state it built when foreign
aid rolled in as
regularly as the tide. The result is increasing poverty (over
27 percent of the
population, according to the United Nations) and disintegrating
families -- 41
percent of all children are born to single mothers.

ECONOMIC FACTOR

The tough times have driven many women to prostitution, which
is legal here. And
although the minimum age for prostitution is 18 (and sexual contact
of any kind
with a child under 15 is illegal), underage boys and girls have
inevitably come
under the sway of a booming sex industry that some officials
believe has become
a vital sector of the economy.

Snaps Lilliam Gomez, Costa Rica's chief sex-crimes prosecutor:
``It's not just
that the government is not trying hard enough to solve this problem.
Parts of the
government are actually promoting this. We have advertisements
for escort
services in our own tourist brochures. Escort services! For God's
sake! What are
we doing here?''

Costa Rica is by no means the only Central American country with
a child
prostitution problem. The length of the isthmus, children can
be found selling sex
to escape extreme poverty and dysfunctional families:

In Nicaragua, hundreds of teenage girls line the shiny new Masaya
Highway
commercial corridor on Managua's south side every night, sometimes
yanking
their blouses over their heads to lure customers from the passing
traffic.

In Honduras, a Philadelphia special-education teacher, David Gary
Rounds, was
arrested in a hotel room in La Ceiba, on the country's north
coast, with two
12-year-old boys in his bed. Police found a diary in which Rounds
described a
long string of sexual encounters with Honduran kids as young
as 8. Wrote
Rounds: ``How many times I have shook my head and said, this
is heaven! So
many boys.''

In Guatemala, a survey of street children aged 8 to 14 found that
56 percent didn't
know the name of the first person with whom they had sex.

But in Costa Rica, child prostitution seems to be out of control.
When word got
out last September that Casa Alianza -- the Latin American affiliate
of the New
York-based Covenant House, a private organization that works
with street children
-- would investigate reports of child prostitution, the group
fielded 130 complaints
in just three weeks.

``The complaints get more horrifying the more you look into them,''
says Bruce
Harris, Casa Alianza's British-born executive director. ``We've
got a case of a
12-year-old girl being prostituted by her aunt, $120 for three
hours. But she only
works until 1 p.m. After that, she has to go to her sixth-grade
classes.''

A confidential report prepared by the Costa Rican government and
obtained by
The Herald makes it clear that the child-sex trade here has become
blatant to the
point of fearlessness:

Recruiters from one brothel routinely work right in front of the
U.S. embassy,
using a limousine as bait for kids walking home from elementary
school.

Neighbors report that a woman in San Jose's Paso Ancho neighborhood
is
running a brothel for teenage prostitutes -- including her own
daughter -- in her
house. But police haven't tried to enter the home because of
``threats'' from the
woman. The report notes that hers is an ``aggressive family.''

Parents who answered an American man's classified ad in Costa
Rica's
English-language weekly Tico Times, seeking writers and illustrators
for children's
books, were instead offered $8.50 an hour to bring their kids
by for nude photo
sessions. Some did.

But it's hardly necessary to read secret government reports to
learn the details of
Costa Rica's commerce in juvenile sex. Anyone with eyes can see
it -- from the
teenage hookers who scurry around the lobby of the downtown Holiday
Inn,
conferring with bellboys about likely customers, to the taxi
drivers who seemingly
know the address of every brothel in town.

``Taxi drivers know everything, because they form an important
part of the
network,'' explains cabbie Juan Carlos Rojas, who says he's never
taken
customers to brothels but nonetheless was able to point out several
on a drive
through San Jose. ``The taxi driver carries the customer to the
pimp, the
customer pays the pimp $100, and the pimp gives the driver $40.
Everybody
makes a buck. This country is as corrupt as it comes.''

BOYS INVOLVED TOO

Not every child works in a brothel. Stephanie and Ivette, the
two little girls who
propositioned a Herald reporter, are part of a group of about
two dozen kids -- half
of them boys -- who can be found on a downtown street corner
almost every night.

Ivette was bundled up in a jacket against the low-60s temperatures,
but her
younger sister Stephanie was dressed like a tiny doll version
of a hooker, in red
hot pants and a tightly cut halter top that left her small midriff
bare.

The two girls said they've been working as prostitutes for a year,
since they were
aged 11 and 12. Even then, they weren't the youngest on the corner;
that would
be 9-year-old Iliana, who left home after being repeatedly sexually
molested by an
uncle and now lives in a nearby hotel on her prostitution earnings.
(Iliana came
racing over when she saw a foreign man on the corner, but backed
away quickly
when she discovered he was a reporter.)

Ivette and Stephanie view their work matter-of-factly. Ivette
says she's been with
``a ton'' of men over the past year. ``Am I happy? Well, the
men are happy
afterwards. Me, I just do it for the money, to help my parents.''
Asked what kind of
jobs her parents have, she replies softly: ``Me.''

Both of them still live at home. In other Latin American countries,
child
prostitution is practiced mainly by street kids. In Costa Rica,
however, the
overwhelming majority of the children go home to their families,
according to a
U.N. study in 1999.

ABUSED AT HOME

Ivette, Stephanie and Iliana are in no way unusual. Most child
prostitutes begin
before their 12th birthday, and 82 percent of them were sexually
abused at home
before turning to prostitution, according to at least one U.N.
study.

``I go over and talk to those girls a lot,'' says an American
who operates a
business near downtown San Jose's Morazan Park, where scores
of underage
prostitutes line up on Saturday nights to await customers from
nearby bars. ``And
every single one of them tells the same story: She decided to
come to the park
so she could get paid for what she was having to give away free
at home. There's
something wrong in this country.''

Many Costa Ricans psychologists and social workers agree. ``There's
a vast
amount of incest in the Costa Rican nuclear family,'' says Marta
Montel, who
works at an outreach program for street children. ``People are
only just starting to
see it as a problem. People have always known it's not exactly
normal -- they
know in their hearts that there's something wrong with it --
but it was always seen
as something traditional, not something to worry about.''

Concurs psychologist Jorge Sanabria of the Child Welfare Institute:
``The idea
that foreigners created this problem is wrong. What has happened
is that there is
a culture of sexual abuse of children in this country, and foreigners
have taken
advantage of it.''

INTERNET SITES

Nonetheless, there's no question that foreign pedophiles are flocking
to Costa
Rica. Recent criminal cases have implicated British, Egyptian,
Swiss and U.S.
nationals in child prostitution and pornography. Internet sites
devoted to sexual
tourism brim with comments about Costa Rican nightclubs, hotels,
and street
corners where young prostitutes can be found, complete with prices.

A typical exchange on a site called the World Sex Guide: ``The
Hotel Park was
kind of interesting . . . We notice that most of the ladies sitting
out in a little
courtyard were about 16 or 17.''

Costa Rican officials believe the influx of foreigners seeking
underage sex is being
driven in part by the general increase in tourism here (1.25
million visitors are
expected this year, three times as many as in any other Central
American
country) and partly by the increasingly difficult conditions
for pedophiles in other
parts of the world.

Countries like Thailand, long notorious for child prostitution,
are cracking down.
And some American pedophiles have been driven overseas by the
wave of states
passing so-called Megan's Laws -- named for a little girl raped
and murdered by a
neighbor -- that require anyone convicted of a sexual offense
against children to
register his address as a public record.

There was only one conviction in all of Costa Rica last year related
to sexual
exploitation of children. ``The statistics don't look very good,''
admitted Attorney
General Carlos Arias.

Part of the problem is that child prostitution is a difficult
crime to investigate. ``It's
not like we can just look at a bunch of girls on the street and
say, hey,
prostitution, let's make some arrests,'' said Jorge Rojas, acting
head of the Office
of Judicial Investigations, the Costa Rican equivalent of the
FBI. ``You've got to
infiltrate people and demonstrate that it's really taking place.''

INEFFICIENT JUSTICE

Police also have to deal with a creaky and inefficient judicial
system. Until late
last year, possession of child pornography was not illegal and
the statute used to
go after customers of underage prostitutes applied only if a
child was ``virginal.''
That is, unless cops made arrests on the very first day a little
girl worked as a
prostitute, they could forget it.

Even with tougher new laws, liberal judicial policies on bail
make it easy for
foreigners to stay one jump ahead of the police. Cops busted
a child-pornograpy
studio in December, seizing a huge quantity of photos and video
and computer
equipment. But the two Americans arrested during the raid were
quickly released
on $300 bail. ``They're not supposed to leave the country, but
do you suppose
that will stop them?'' asks attorney general Arias.

But perhaps the toughest obstacle facing the police is that they
get no
cooperation at all from the children they are trying to help.
``When I've helped the
police do a raid on a bar, the people who are the angriest are
not the clients, but
the girls themselves, the prostitutes,'' Harris admits. ``The
way they see it, we're
taking their livelihoods away. When they see themselves as an
employee rather
than a victim, it's very difficult to help them.''

Johanna has been working as a prostitute for 18 months. She's
been beaten up
three times and extorted for sex and money by rogue cops on many
occasions.
Still, she kept working the streets four nights a week even through
a pregnancy
and has no intention of stopping now.

FEEDING HER CHILDREN

``Everything I do is for my two little ones at home,'' she says.
``They have to eat,
they have to have milk, and I don't know what else to do.'' A
few minutes later,
after the photographer left, she was back on the street, laughing
and chatting with
potential clients.

It is the seeming intractability of the young prostitutes themselves
that authorities
and social workers find most frustrating. ``Getting them to quit
is the most difficult
part,'' says Ana Cecelia Fuentes, a social worker. ``The money
is good, and even
if they don't like the work, they don't want to lose the money
. . . There are no
easy answers.''

But, almost everyone agrees, the country has to come up with some.
``When we
started promoting ecotourism, we learned that we can't cut down
trees and
destroy the rain forest, because then the tourists won't come,''
warns the tourism
institute's Castro. ``Can you imagine how much greater the damage
is going to be
if we start destroying Costa Ricans themselves?''

The story was supplemented by reporting from Herald special correspondent
Catalina Calderon.